Pre-Conference Workshops

SLO Coordinators/Researchers Workshop and POWER Awards: It Takes a Village to Assess a College

Marcy Alancraig, Priyadarshini Chaplot, Janet Fulks, Lesley Kawaguchi, Robert Pacheco, Beth Smith and Linda Umdenstock, RP Group/ ASCCC SLO Collaborative

Authentic and meaningful assessment of student learning requires the expertise of many members of the college community. SLO Coordinators, faculty, student services professionals, administrators and researchers each possess a particular vantage point from which they view student success. With all our different angles of vision, how can we work together to recognize when that success is occurring? This session will focus on connecting the dots between assessment activities across the campus and analyzing the indicators and positive effects of student achievement. In addition, we’ll recognize a few faculty, researchers and SLO Coordinators whose outstanding work has been translated into success at their own schools and whose approach to assessment can serve as examples for your own. The 2010 Promising Outcomes Work and Exemplary Research (POWER) award recipients will be honored, in appreciation for how they have contributed to their own villages and to the state as a whole.

Rethinking How We Move Students to College and Career: Approaches That Work

Career Ladders Project

Challenging times require bold responses. This is a time when we can do things differently, and bring together what we know works, particularly in moving students towards their career goals. Practices which show promise for accelerating progress and completion for students with multiple barriers to post-secondary education include: more intentional and structured program design; integration of career technical and academic education; contextualized and applied learning; more holistic student supports; and clear transition strategies. Taken together, these constitute a very different approach to community college education and lead to re-examining current structures and practices, especially with respect to career technical education and basic skills. > > Drawing on work of faculty and administrators engaged in a range of initiatives, this interactive session will consider student outcomes, program evaluation and research to explore what’s proving effective. Participants will leave with new insights into career pathway strategies, current work going on in California and some action steps for use back on campus.

Exploring Inquiry: Ideas and Innovations from the Faculty Inquiry Network

Katie Hern, Tom deWit, & Sean McFarland, Faculty Inquiry Network

This interactive workshop will feature the key ideas and innovations emerging from the Faculty Inquiry Network (FIN), a two-year collaboration of faculty and students from colleges across California, all using inquiry to better understand and support student learning. The experiences of the 18 FIN teams provide insight into not only issues of teaching and learning, but also the role of inquiry as a catalyst for innovation and effective practice. Through video footage, sample data, and stories from inside FIN, participants will see how institutional context, the human condition, and collaboration can impede or support inquiry. They will also engage with elements of inquiry that have been especially powerful inside FIN, including an expansive approach to data, bringing student voices to the foreground, “making visible” and going public, coaching, networking, and – perhaps most important, a willingness to be vulnerable. This workshop will be appropriate for people just learning about inquiry, as well as those who have had prior experience and want to facilitate this work on their own campus.

Designing an Evidence Based Basic Skills Program: A Systematic Approach

Deborah Harrington, Brock Klein, Nancy Ybarra, & Lynn Wright, Basic Skills Initiative

Many colleges have implemented a variety of programs, resources, and services intended to improve the success of basic skills students across the curriculum. While these activities may be innovative, and even successful in the short term, can they be sustained? Can they and should they be “scaled up”? Is there a coherent thread that ties disparate activities together into a programmatic approach? Join faculty and administrators from both the beginning and advanced BSI Summer Leadership institutes in exploring tools for systematic program planning and evaluation. You will learn how you can use these tools in your program, and how other colleges have used them to clarify their goals and systematically provide evidence that their activities and programs are leading to greater student success.
 

Tools for Data Driven Decision Making 

Terrence Willett & Victor Manchik, Cal-PASS

Supporting program review is a demanding task for educators. Even if all required analyses are available in standard reports, there is often an impetus to dig deeper into the data, which often means submitting new research requests. Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) technology enables quick, flexible analyses of databases. Using a web based interface, a user can drag-and-drop variables into tables or charts. This gives the ability to efficiently navigate extremely large datasets. A new OLAP program review support report called the Standardized Metrics for Analysis, Reporting, and Tracking or SMART Tool has been designed by Cal-PASS for its member institutions. Included are variables for enrollments, awards, demographics, grades, and course attributes. This session will demonstrate how users can access and utilize this new tool.